The world of higher education is a world of sorting, selecting, and ranking--on both sides of the market. Colleges select students to recruit and then to admit; students choose where to apply and which offer to accept. The sorting process that gets the most attention is in the higher reaches of the market, where it is not too much to say that everybody is ranking and comparing all the time. Viewed from the outside, the activity at the high end, which the authors call the "Little Sort," has a breathless, almost frenzied quality--the stuff, these days, of novels and "New Yorker" cartoons. The more significant sorting, though--the one that has a major impact on the lives of many students and on the character of the inequality in American society--is a process most people take for granted. This "Big Sort" sends young people from low-income families, or those with parents who did not go to college, to community colleges or for-profit institutions--or to the military, or straight into the labor force. Meanwhile, it sends the most talented and generally the most privileged children into the competitive "Little Sort." The extreme and in the authors' view irrational mania for sorting among elite students and institutions is worthy of attention. It wastes valuable financial and human resources and causes damaging levels of stress in some of the most talented young people, while encouraging them to engage in activities that do more harm than good to their emotional and intellectual development. Moreover, the current pressures on public higher education to become more selective in an attempt to move up in the prestige hierarchy threaten to make the frenzy spread to a much larger segment of the market. But frenzied competition does not reflect the experience of most students or most postsecondary institutions. It is still true that a large fraction of people attending college apply and get in to exactly one institution. In the background of the attention-getting "Little Sort" that allocates star students among elite places, the "Big Sort" involves a set of forces working outside the spotlight that wind up determining which students have a plethora of choices about which college to go to and which have few choices or, too often, none at all. (Contains 5 resources.)